Stem Cells, Health, Technology

mRNA Vaccine Makes Unintended Proteins Causing Immune Reaction

Alterations of mRNA sequence that help prevent messenger RNA degradation in living cells create unintended protein synthesis – not the proteins that are part of the spike proteins

A new study from Cambridge University reveals that mRNA vaccines may unexpectedly instruct cells to produce small amounts of unintended proteins. A key feature of therapeutic in vitro transcribed mRNAs is that they contain modified ribonucleotides, which have been found to decrease innate immunogenicity and can additionally increase mRNA stability, both of which are favorable characteristics for mRNA therapies, allowing the mRNA to survive in the body without rapid degradation and therefore produce proteins of interest – namely for the mRNA vaccines, make viral spike proteins. However, proteins other than the spike proteins are being made, and these unintended proteins are eliciting an immune reaction. The consequences of this unintended immune reaction have not been studied.

As written in Science, “There is no evidence that these mistakes compromise the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives, and the researchers have already proposed a fix that may help make future vaccines or drugs based on mRNAs safer and even more effective.”

When one says “there is no evidence,” one should also say that “there is no evidence because it has not been studied.” That’s different from saying, “we looked at these aberrant proteins made by the mRNA vaccine, and found them to cause no harm.”

Many studies have pointed to the harms caused by Covid-19 vaccines, and some of the things you can do to limit the harms. Quoting from Fraiman et al (2022), “These results raise concerns that mRNA vaccines are associated with more harm than initially estimated at the time of emergency authorization.” As they further state, “Full transparency of the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data is needed to properly evaluate these questions. Unfortunately, as we approach 2 years after release of COVID-19 vaccines, participant level data remain inaccessible.” In other words, safety data is purposely being hidden, and the safety of our vaccines is not understood. Once again, scientists have a created a new technology, with many possible benefits to mankind, but physicians in control of our healthcare agencies have failed to properly control the clinical aspects of the new technology. This is nothing new in our deregulated, commercialized healthcare system – The Medicalization of America.

Cancer: It’s The Environment, and Sometimes Genetics Plays a Role

Analyses of tumors sometimes reveal a gene rearrangement or mutation, but no DNA mutations are found in many cancers, suggesting that mechanisms for cancer initiation are broader than is typically thought. Thinking outside the cancer mutation box.

In the nineteen-seventies, Dr. Mina Bissell, Ph.D., a professor at UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Lab, was establishing the importance of the microenvironment in the development and spread of cancer. Meanwhile, at the same time, Dr. Bruce Ames, Ph.D., a professor of biochemistry at Berkeley, devised a ground-breaking way to test whether a chemical might cause cancer by assaying for mutagenesis. Various other concepts of cancer biology at the time were promulgated beyond what Dr. Bissell had found. Biology at the time was controlled by genetic fashionistas – the structure of DNA had been discovered and conceptualized, and biological reductionism was at its height. Some thought DNA was responsible for nearly everything. Dr. Ames’ studies of DNA mutagenesis were embraced therefore, while Dr. Bissell’s would only be embraced much later. Dr. Ames, like Dr. Bissell, knew very well that mutagenesis of DNA was not the whole story of cancer. But if we listen to physicians, such as Francis Collins, M.D. and Leroy Hood, M.D., proponents of genomic-based precision medicine, we are led astray. They predicted people would carry a card with their genome sequence on it, and physicians would use the genetic information to treat your disease. I remember when I was a professor at UCSD and a group of us heard Collins say this – we all laughed. This was so stupid. Knowing one’s DNA sequence has not been predictive of health. Within the framework of the DNA hype was one concept of cancer that was simple and easy to grasp – that cancer resulted from genetic mutations—changes in a cell’s DNA sequence that were related to cells dividing uncontrollably. These mutations were sometimes inherited, induced by viruses, or generated by random copying errors in dividing cells. They could also be produced by physical or chemical agents, such as radiation treatment, ultraviolet radiation, and benzene.

Drs. Ames and Bissell knew better than to believe the genetic hype. To the contrary, Dr. Bissell had published a paper finding that a cancerous cell full of mutations could be returned to a normal phenotype, a non-cancerous cell, by returning the cancerous, mutated cell back to a normal microenvironment. Key here is the root word – environment. In other words, the environment is controlling cancer formation. Dr. Ames, knew his test wasn’t a comprehensive method for predicting carcinogens. Epidemiologists were learning, for example, that exposure to estrogen-like chemicals, such as diethylstilbestrol (DES), increases the risk of vaginal, cervical, and breast cancer, and toxicologists found similar results in experimental mice and rats models. Further support for the non-mutagenesis model of cancer was that DES wasn’t found to be mutagenic in cell cultures. Instead, DES has been found to alter proteins and genetic expression. Additional classes of carcinogens were added to the list. One feature of cancer cells is that they avoid detection by the immune system. We now understand that chemicals that suppress the immune system, such as prescription cyclosporine, are cancer-promoting, even though they don’t cause mutations in DNA. Other drugs for the eye also increase the risk of cancer, such as the topical drugs used for glaucoma. Sadly, these drugs that lower intraocular pressure don’t work well (about 40% of people with glaucoma don’t have elevated IOP) and induce many eye and other health problems.

Our exposome, what we’ve been exposed to throughout our lives, determines about 90% of your health status (Rapapport et al, 2010), not genetics. Even so-called “genetic diseases” such as sickle cell anemia are characterized by, as the CDC says, “People with [sickle cell trait] usually do not have any of the symptoms of sickle cell disease and live a normal life.” So why is it that most people with the genetic trait said to cause sickle cell, don’t have the disease? We don’t know the environmental determinants of sickle cell because we don’t study them. Instead, because it’s easy to do so and is in fashion, we study the genetics and create unaffordable genetic treatments for the disease that are so cumbersome that it requires the patient to be in the hospital for months and potentially for a year while spending millions of dollars for one treatment. Not often discussed in the media is that the sickle cell treatment requires chemotherapy to eliminate bone marrow cells. Chemotherapy has side-effects, including an increased risk of different types of cancer. In this case, while the treatment paradigm can lead to diminished healthspan, focusing on the environmental causes of sickle cell can increase healthspan. A stated by Roberts et al (2012) in the prestigious journal, Science, state: “The general public does not appear to be aware that, despite their very similar height and appearance, monozygotic twins [twins with the same inherited genetics] in general do not always develop or die from the same maladies.” Again, it’s the environment, not genetics.

Treatment’s a money-maker though, something that will benefit a few – a few millionaires and billionaires, and possibly a few patients. To make even more money, the billionaires will have the drugs made in India, where it’s cheap to manufacture, yielding higher profits, record profits, for the wealthy drug companies. These bad drugs are a part of your exposome. Who cares if these drugs manufactured in India are killing and maiming people, the pharma companies make gobs of money and that’s what counts in deregulated capitalism. When I say the drug may benefit a few patients, we have to ask the question, “compared to what?” Will the treatment benefit patients who do nothing other than the treatment? Possibly it is better than doing nothing. Is treatment better than altering one’s exposome? Probably not. Most clinical trials for a treatment use “doing nothing” as the comparator. The trial will not be the treatment versus a beneficial alteration of the patient’s exposome. Such as clinical trial would likely lead to failure for the CRISPR clinical trial. If that happens, money is lost and we can’t have that because the treatment system is about making money.

Although FDA has approved this treatment, will it be commercially viable, and will it really work and be safe? Or will it be like most FDA approved treatments that don’t work, and the many that are later pulled from the market for severe safety issues? We live in a country that is dominated by the treatment paradigm, and largely ignores the most important determinant of our health – our environment. Calling sickle cell anemia a genetic disease, when the environment is key and most people with the sickle cell genetic trait don’t have symptoms, is but one example.

Looking at the greatest determinants of healthspan, exposure to environmental toxicants has been shown to associate with molecular hallmarks of aging (Pandics et al, 2023). Advances in geroscience have led to a paradigm shift in our understanding of the pathogenesis of chronic age-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). It is now recognized that all age-associated diseases share common underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging. These mechanisms include increased oxidative stress, matrix breakdown, cellular mitochondrial and energetic dysfunction, impaired cellular stress resilience, genetic instability and DNA damage, induction of cell senescence, heightened state of inflammation, epigenetic dysregulation, altered proteostasis, disruption of intercellular communication (including endocrine changes), stem cell dysfunction, and dysregulation of energy sensing pathways. Proteins are particularly labile, including to the many nanoparticles in the environment, leading to aging processes throughout the body. Aging is a great predictor of cancer.

A recent paper demonstrates how air pollution induces cancer. The mutation numbers in the control mice were not significantly different from those in the treated mice. Whatever had caused the tenfold increase in the number of tumors in these mice wasn’t producing new mutations inside the cancer cells. Using air pollution in a liquified form that can easily be applied, Hill and his colleagues suspected that the effects of the liquefied air pollution were found outside the cancer cell, in the cell’s microenvironment that Dr. Mina Bissell, Ph.D. had taught us decades ago. So they went back to the tissue, dissecting out the tumors, cutting slices, and looking under the microscope. The lungs of the mice that had been exposed to the air pollution, they found, were full of inflammatory cells, not an abnormal amount of mutations.

A key factor in the tumor development therefore were inflammatory cells, especially a particular type of macrophage which was releasing a potent inflammatory signal, interleukin-1 beta. When the interleukin-1 beta was blocked with an antibody, the effect of air-pollution exposure was reduced. When Hill, Lim, and Weeden performed their experiment with immune-deficient mice (no macrophages), the effect of air pollution disappeared. Evidence that the macrophages, and their chemical signals, were promoting tumor development.

Once again, the environment was causing the cancer, not mutations in the DNA. We need to spend more time and money on the environmental determinants of diseases, including cancer. Alas, this isn’t a money-maker for pharma and physicians.

Israel Needs to Rid Themselves of Bibi Netanyahu, and the US Needs to Rid Themselves of Biden, Blinken, Trump and the Like.

These men are mass murderers, and have been for a long time. Bibi has been killing people in the Middle East for decades, supported Hamas for decades, and Biden, Trump, and Blinken learned nothing by supporting George Bush’s obliteration of Iraq. Now they hug Bibi as he mass murders people in Gaza. Let’s rid ourselves of these nitwit, war mongers.

In these days when Republicans are controlled by corporations, Russia, and Israel, and Democrats are controlled by corporations and Israel, it’s time for the people in the US to take control of their government.

Cease Fire, Not Genocide. That is all.

Don’t Expect The XPrize To Innovate The Healthspan Field

Innovation prizes are best at promoting refinements, not revolutions. While health and longevity depend primarily on the exposome, the corporate mentality in the US, including the corporate thought of physicians, leads to Medicalization and a treatment paradigm for promoting health. We in the US live in a Medicalization paradigm that is bad for health – the US has the most expensive and worst performing “healthcare” system in the world. People in healthcare make money when they perform treatments and making money is the key performance metric for most all that is done in the US. The Medicalization mentality leads the X-Prize to offer $101 M for a reductionist therapeutic strategy that reduces aging. This XPrize challenge will refine Medicalization, help some people make money, but offer little in improving healthspan as it ignores the greatest contributor to healthspan – our exposome.

Treatment’s a money-maker though, something that will benefit a few – a few millionaires and billionaires, and possibly a few patients. When I say it may benefit a few patients, we have to aks the question, “compared to what?” Will the treatment benefit patients who do nothing other than the treatment? Possibly it is better than doing nothing. Is treatment better than altering one’s exposome? Probably not. Most clinical trials for a treatment use “doing nothing” as the comparator. The trial will not be the treatment versus a beneficial alteration of the patient’s exposome. Such as clinical trial would likely lead to failure for the CRISPR clinical trial. If that happens, money is lost and we can’t have that because the treatment system is about making money.

The US healthcare system does little to nothing in preventing and remediating these exposome induced aging processes. In fact, healthcare is a large part of the problem. Being needlessly irradiated by physicians, undergoing unneeded surgery (75% of stents are unneeded and unneeded C-sections are a national epidemic), or taking useless drugs, such as those for cancer, induces a harmful exposome that leads to aging. Yes, the US healthcare system is bad for your health, empties your bank account if you are a user but fills it if you are a provider. As Dr. Allen Roses, M.D., of Duke University, has said, most of our prescription drugs don’t work. This is true for many drug categories, including cancer and antidepressants. We also know that most medical procures don’t work, and the level of harm they cause is rarely known. According to Howick et al (2022), “More than 9 in 10 healthcare interventions studied within recent Cochrane Reviews are not supported by high-quality evidence, and harms are under-reported.”

Medicalization and its treatment paradigm continues to waste much of society’s money. We have medicalization and the treatment paradigm because all of the healthcare money flows to treatment and treatment research, not prevention and not the environment. Our National Institutes of Health, which controls about 85% of all medical and biological research in the US, is controlled by physicians, not scientists. And what do physicians do – they treat. They don’t prevent and they are clueless about the environmental aspects of health. The XPrize Healthspan program continues this tradition. It is led by Peter Diamandis, M.D., a guy with one peer-reviewed journal article as a junior author, an apparent con-artist, cofounder of a failed biotech company and a fake university, and a self-proclaimed authority on almost everything. This is a guy who has never built anything of consequence. As a result of our medicalization, the US will continue to have the most expensive and worst performing “healthcare” system in the world, and the XPrize will only foster more of the same.

Tommy Tupperware, A Hermaphrodite, With Two Vaginas on Either Side of His Head, Should Use His Ears to Fly Away

As stated in a book from the MIT Press, “The vagina resembles the fleshy folds of the ear without the cartilage.” With two huge vaginas on either side of his head, Tommy Tupperware should know. Just look on either side of his head. Some would call them ears, some would say they’re vaginas with cartilage.

You’d think hermaphrodites would be more sensitive to the needs of people with sexual needs, but, alas, in Tommy’s case, it ain’t so. You can’t expect much from a guy from Arkansas with a degree in physical education from Southern Arkansas University; only if he had spent time at Auburn University with people like Tim Cook who use their non-binary sexual identity to do good and work in a positive way with people of all kinds.

Tommy, use your big ears to paraglide, to fly away. Let other people have the sexual care they need and deserve.

Inflation. Why? Not Government Spending.

Corporate greedflation; Corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows

Consider a single consumer. That person is given money by the government. Now he or she goes out and buys something they need. Because they bought an item, did the cost of manufacturing that item increase? No. Because the government gave them the money to buy the item, did the cost of manufacturing go up? No. Two factors that don’t cause inflation.

So, now with the government giving people money, the demand for the item has gone up. Did the increase in demand cause the cost of manufacturing to go up? No. According to free-market theory, the more products that are made to meet the increased demand, the more the cost of manufacturing should go down. Therefore the price to the consumer should go down as “economies of scale” are realized. Here, because government gave people money to buy things and economies of scale are achieved, inflation should be reduced.

But, in reality this doesn’t happen. Corporations are making record profits, and this drives inflation. So as costs of manufacturing go down as “economies of scale” are realized, the corporations are raising prices to consumers. And with the advent since Reagan of huge corporations, where no anti-trust laws are enforced (the Milton Friedman Chicago neoliberal ideology), huge corporations can do as they please without competition. Recently, as we see record corporate profits slightly fall, we also see a slight fall in inflation.

Where does all that profit-realized cash go? The rich no longer pay much tax (about 3%), so it goes into the hands of the wealthy, not to things that support the middle class as previously happened before Ronald Reagan cut taxes for the wealthy, and deregulated and privatized almost everything. The few taxes that the wealthy must pay can be avoided by a number of schemes, including stashing the cash overseas in the corrupt country of Switzerland. Other tax avoidance schemes used by the wealthy, such as Elon Musk, include not making any income, but receiving personal “loans” from banks that want his business, and the personal “loans” neither having any interest payments, nor does the loan ever become due – the loan is never called. The term, “loan” is a euphemism for a tax dodging bribe.

So if you think government spending drives inflation, think again and don’t allow yourself to be a right-wing Republican stooge who ignorantly repeats the rich man’s self-serving, exploitive narrative. The ever decreasing, struggling few in the middle class, thanks to Reagan, depend on it.

Quarantine Camps: Where do they Exist? Answer: Texas, not New York.

With Texas governor, Greg Abbott, refusing to allow immigrants to be transported, the state now has set-up quarantine camps in the south of Texas to imprison people. This is not occurring in New Yor, it is Texas.

Amid a resurgence of coronavirus infections in many parts of the country, some conservative politicians, including the governors of Texas and Florida, have blamed the Biden administration’s failure to halt the influx of migrants for the soaring case numbers. If Covid-19 is no big deal as these two nitwits often argue, why is Covid-19 at the border so worrisome for them? Yes, when it is politically convenient for them to do so, they worry about Covid-19. Otherwise, it’s business as usual and they allow Covid-19 to spread and kill and maim their citizens. Something as easy to do as wear a mask, which helps to reduce the probability of transmission and if infected, reduce the severity of the symptoms, is against the ideology of Abbott and DeSantis. If it’s public health, they are against it. That’s why their two states, Texas and Florida, are pollution havens for the wealthy corporations.

And remember, autoimmune disease is soaring the US, and a Covid-19 infection or a Covid-19 mRNA vaccine increases IgG4-mediated autoimmunity. IgG4 autoimmune disease is not something you want – it can induce leaky gut, brain dysfunction, heart disease, among other ailments. So wear a mask, and stay out of the quarantine camps in Texas, built during the days of Trump, where you’re likely to catch the disease.

DeSantis, Mapping Poop in his Brains

DeSantis was booted-up in his 4 inch high heels for a debate, and forced a number of hyena style grins, as he lied through is large looming cracked smile, remembering this time to not stick out his tongue. Ronny, the lying governor from the crime ridden state of Florida (the leader in murder, mass shootings, money laundering, and fraud), uses a canine “poop map” for the city of San Francisco to pretend that people are pooping all over the streets of the beautiful city of San Francisco (San Diego and San Francisco are ranked the most beautiful in the USA, and they are two of the top four tech hubs, SF, NY, LA, SD, in the USA).

Ron DeSantis holding a picture of the poop-map of his brain.

While his hometown of Jacksonville, FL suffers from pollution, homelessness, and has a crime rate twice that of San Francisco, his pathetically stupid and inept state has no idea how bad crime is in the state of Florida. Cancer is largely caused by pollution and cancer rates in Florida are soaring. In a state where the wealthy pay little in taxes and DeSantis helps them hide their income, and 1 in 5 corporations pay no taxes, it’s little wonder that Florida is highly polluted and a laggard in public institutions, including it’s substandard colleges. In California, the wealthy are taxed, and that’s one reason why the state has the best universities in the world – big drivers of California’s economy the 4th or 5th largest in the world.

The guy was elected governor of Florida because the Orange Jesus supported him. Ron, the numbskull that he is, bit the hand that fed him. Trump was the reason why DeSantis was elected governor. But DeSantis is the reason why DeSantis will never be elected president. Ronny is a two-bit version of Tony Soprano, but with a real-life mafia boss wife.

Rich Man, Corporate Feudalism in the USA

Pure capitalism is bad, but corporate feudalism is worse. When the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel control the media, control the economy, control the government, including national, state, and local, those outside the top 1% suffer badly.

In my daily Google news feed, I read: Elon Musk said…….., Bill Gates said………., Jeff Bezos said…….., Peter Thiel said……., Mark Zuckerberg said….. These guys, born to wealthy, connected families, who got lucky and made gobs more money than what they were born with, now control society. As Nobel Laureate, Dr. Daniel Hahnemann, Ph.D., teaches us in Thinking Fast and Slow, the wealthy become wealthy mostly through luck. Its not just dumb luck, its ruthless luck. Donald Trump was a puppet on a string for these lucky guys, and Genocide Joe appears to be a hand puppet for a different set of these lucky guys. GJ supported Busch’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now supports Israel’s continued destruction of Palestine. So captured are the serfs of Donald Trump that they attack the institution that could support them. If only these knuckleheads were educated and understood that the US government could be controlled by them if they voted for people who supported the middle class. Instead, they attack the very institution that could serve them, doing so in support of a man who is a mean spirited, feudal landlord, Donald Trump.

Voting for a president who champions the middle class hasn’t happened since the plutocratic-shill Ronald Reagan was first elected, who deregulated and privatized almost everything in support of the rich men. At least in the Democratic party there is descent and has been a majority vote to limit the powers of our feudal landlords. Still, most Democrats are supported by corporations and PACs, such as AIPAC, which is reported to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to beat members of congress who dare to question Israel. Currently, we have the Israeli tail wagging the American dog. And from where does AIPAC receive its money in order to bribe congress? Rich, right-wing billionaires of course. The word democracy when used to describe the US is a joke. The US government, led by shills for rich and corporate forces is constantly lying to us and deceiving us. People such as myself and Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D. at Columbia University are leaving the Democratic party. And, no, we sure are not joining the Republican party – that group is bunch of nutjobs, who even if they weren’t bribed by the rich and corporations, wouldn’t have a clue how to run this country.

Meanwhile, Peter Thiel is giving lectures at Stanford, underneath the Hoover Tower, a landmark for the neoliberal Hoover Institute, espousing the “every man for himself” credo. Yes, our private universities have been, and continue to be, educators of the rich man, corporate class. And today’s corporations no longer value the society that allows them to exist, no longer values the workers that bring capital to the corporation, but value one thing, and only one thing, the owners of the corporation.

Capitalism, in theory but not reality, is about free markets. Capitalism has never really existed. The era of the Robber Barons is but one example. What existed at the time was feudalism. This was a time when the rich man (nobility) controlled everything. A small middle class was allowed to exist in order to have middle managers. The rest of the people were slaves. If the workers tried to stand-up to the plutocrats, they were shot. and their houses burned. This happens world-wide. If you think Genocide Joe sides with the workers, think again. The railroad strike was proof he doesn’t. If the slaves could afford to vote because they had enough money to pay the poll taxes, the choice of candidates was only a choice between rich men who were stamped as either Democrats or Republicans. What you believed was a function of what you learned, and what you learned was through the publications of rich men – you could read King James‘ bible, or Randolph Hearst’s fabricated stories, for example. Both were billionaires, sons of billionaires and both fabricated many stories. Options now include Fox News, owned by a billionaire who wouldn’t know the truth even if Elon Musk programmed it into Rupert’s cortex with Neuralink.

During the years of Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter, we had reduced feudalism in the US. A burgeoning middle class arose and public institutions were greatly supported. Under Eisenhower, the greatest increase in public education ever experienced on plant Earth occurred, and the middle class became smart and powerful. The rich men acting through Ronald Reagan put an end to that. Rich men losing their power cannot be tolerated. How dare these middle class people interrupt our war in Vietnam? That was a very brief time in man’s history when the rich man’s power was receding, that time between Roosevelt to Carter, but we’ve gone back to curtailing democracy for the last 40 years. It’s becoming worse. It’s our new Neoliberal age where Neoliberalism protects feudalism against democracy. Real wages are down, the middle class is shrinking fast, people can’t afford to buy homes, massive numbers of people are sleeping on streets, public schools are being obliterated, school lunches became a contributor to obesity, and the rich man continues to trick serfs to fight one another over fake religious and cultural causes – for example the Islamic Republic of Iran versus Jewish State of Israel, as right-wingers call the US a Christian State. The rich keep people in an emotional state, using religion and fear to dismantle their rational thought. They control the media and have ignoramuses believing in things that are against their best interest.

As described by Yanis Varoufakis, under feudalism, the overlord would grant so-called fiefs to subordinates called vassals. These fiefs gave the vassals the formal right to exploit economically a part of the overlord’s realm – to plant crops on it, for example, or graze cattle – in exchange for a portion of the produce. Bill Gates is the largest private owner of farmland. Forget mom and pop farms – they’re now owned by the rich and corporations. The overlord would then unleash his sheriff to police the fief’s operation and collect what he was owed. Bezo’s relationship with the vendors on Amazon is similar. He grants them digital fiefs, for a fee, and then leaves his algorithm-sheriff to police and collect. In the process, Bezos plays one state against another to receive tax breaks and payouts in order to setup feudal estates on the people’s property. And people in Red States are so ignorant of what’s happening that they embrace the overlord’s taking of their property. How stupid can you be?

Amazon was just the start. Alibaba has applied the same techniques to create a similar digital fief in China. Copycat e-commerce platforms, offering variations on the Amazon theme, are springing up everywhere, in the global south as well as the global north. More significantly, other industrial sectors are turning into digital fiefs too. Consider Tesla, the electric car company that Elon Musk did not found and did not create any of its technology. he stole the company in a hostile takeover. You wouldn’t know this listening to Elon Musk, the pathetic little man ladened with inadequacy issues One reason financiers value Tesla so much more highly than Ford or Toyota is that its cars’ every circuit is wired into the cloud. Besides giving Tesla the power to switch off one of its cars remotely, if for instance the driver fails to service it as the company wishes, merely by driving around Tesla owners are uploading real-time information (including what music they are listening to) that enriches the company’s cloud-based capital. They may not think of themselves as serfs but, alas, that’s precisely what the proud owners of new Teslas are. There’s a huge number of decorticate fan boys associated with Musk, bobbling their heads to his thousands of lies and misinformation.

It required scientific and engineering breakthroughs, fantastical-sounding neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs to accomplish what? Our universities gave us technological marvels, but the monetization of these marvelous technologies by greedy investors turned it all into the mecca of the overlords. Its all used to turn workers into toiling in warehouses, driving Ubers and Amazon trucks, and delivering processed food into digital proles. Its used to create a world where markets are increasingly replaced by digital fiefs. To force businesses into the role of vassals. And to turn all of us into digital serfs, glued to our smartphones and tablets, eagerly producing the capital that keeps our new overlords on an ever increasing pile of cash. The more they have, the more they want. And then send them off to war to protect your feudalism so that self-aggrandization can continue. Technofeudalism has been great for the overlords. It amplifies their voices and consolidates their power.

Technofeudalism erects great barriers to mobilization against it. But it also bestows new power on those who dare dream of a way to topple it – a capacity to build coalitions, organize and take action via the cloud: what is called cloud mobilization. None of this is either easy or inevitable, but is it harder or less likely than what the miners, the seamstresses and the dockworkers envisioned and sacrificed their lives to achieve in the 19th century? The cloud takes – but the cloud also gives to those who want to reclaim freedom and democracy. It is up to us to prove which is greater.

Another Texan, Stanford-Trained, Silicon Valley Fraudster Headed to Jail

Mike Rothenberg, an Austin-area native, Stanford grad, will join fellow Texan, Elizabeth Holmes, a Houston-native who attended Stanford, in jail for committing fraud in another Silicon Valley scheme. Raise them in Texas, and then send them to the Hoover Institute at Stanford, an institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, limited government, and an every-man-for-himself philosophy, and this is what results.

Mike Rothenberg, fraudster extraordinaire, at Stanford, teaching others how to defraud the capitalistic system.

Delivered by a jury in Northern California, the verdict ends a 10-year journey for Rothenberg, who burst onto the Bay Area scene in 2013 at age 27 with a $5 million fund and gobs of BS to persuade some of the hysterical mass media at TechCrunch that his one-man firm was special enough to merit coverage. Known as Silicon Valley’s party animal, this guy differentiated himself by using other people’s money to have lavish parties for entrepreneurs. Rothenberg, a Jehovah’s Witnesses, apparently believes that the destruction of the present world system at Armageddon is imminent, and the establishment of God’s kingdom over earth is the only solution to all of humanity’s problems. So in the meantime, let’s create destruction as we self-aggrandize. Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for their door-to-door preaching of nonsense, so Mr. Rothenberg was well educated in the art of persuading people to believe BS.

As described by the San Francisco Standard, “Free massages for startup founders, hot-air balloon rides in Napa, box seats at Golden State Warriors games: Such was the life for those in the constellation of Rothenberg Ventures, a venture capital firm that was the toast of the Silicon Valley world during its brief heyday in the mid-2010s. The company’s excessive practices became notable enough to be skewered by an episode of the HBO tech satire Silicon Valley.” The $5 million funding that started the company, according to Bloomberg, came from friends, family and former classmates at Stanford University and Harvard Business School.

In our capitalistic system, where good-ole-boys give each other money, Rothenberg assured one investor, who put $2 million into Rothenberg’s River Studios in early 2016, that their investment would be put into the company; in actuality, Rothenberg used much of that money to pay back funds that he borrowed from these guys.

By the end of December 2015, Rothenberg had deceived Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), another recently fallen star in the tech ecosystem, led by a guy from Indiana who now lives on the high hog in Hawaii. These guys suck money from the middle class to orchestrate their self-aggrandizing schemes. It’s the Ronald Reagan deregulated, Neoliberal hellscape that we live in. Rothenberg sought to obtain a $4 million credit line from the bank so as to cover up a shortfall he didn’t want investors to know about. While doing this, he apparently made “false statements and misrepresentations” to SVB. But who cares if he’s lying, we’re all gonna make money at the expense of the working stiffs (hehe). Rothenberg misrepresented the size of the company’s 2015 fund and the fees they collected in connection with managing the fund.

At this point, it was clear that something was wrong. In July 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the company—after an employee tipped the agency off to the company’s misconduct. Come August 2016, Rothenberg Ventures faced an exodus of top brass—including two C-suite executives and a partner. Now that they had made their money, before the SEC caught on to their schemes, it was time to jump ship to avoid jail. Knowing when to pull-out is critical to making money and staying out of jail. It’s the timing method, and as a Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mike was apparently not well schooled in the timing method and pulling out when screwing people.